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It is embarrassing to utter a screaming banality in public: yet love, in all candour, is what the Catholic Church, to say nothing of the world in general, does desperately need. Think of a Christian. Then of Christians as a group. Busy. Long-suffering. Self-effacing. Can you think of them making little sacrifices for one another? Of course. Or perhaps laying down their lives for their brethren? Yes, again. Some of them at least. But do you think of them unzipped and uninhibited, actually loving each other? Ah, well now. . . . Auch unter ihnen sind Helden; viele von ihnen litten zuviel-: so wollen sie andre leiden machen. Amen, Zarathustra.
A French magazine carried out a survey among its readers (Catholics, nearly all of them) on birth control: What the readers thought or did about it, what they thought the Church in general should do about it. What is to the point here is not that the views expressed showed wide divergence, nor even that they revealed such a mass of human suffering:
‘. . . I would have been completely blind if my husband hadn’t shown great love for me by abstaining from pleasure, when he felt the approach of his sexual emission. That’s what love is, otherwise it’s self-love for the sake of pleasure.’
‘Our young couple have been reading a book, The Joys of Loving, which is far too concerned with sex, then Better Love, which is sheer filth, since they ended up knowing more than their parents did after twenty-seven years of marriage.’
1 All these extracts are from Slant, London, No. 16 (1967), 14–16Google Scholar. The French magazine in question is Clair‐Foyer, and its survey was published, ed. P. and M. Lambert, in 1966, by Editions Ouvrières, Paris, as 3,000 foyers parlent.
1 For those who claim the Christianity of the Gospel and seek to struggle in and with the system, such assurance is persuasively argued by Jürgen Moltmann, in Theology of Hope, On the Ground and Implications of Christian Eschatology, S.C.M., London, 1967Google Scholar: see Fergus Kerr, O.P., ‘Eschatology as Polities’, New Blackfriars, April, 1968, and O'Coilins, Gerald S.J., ‘The Principle and Theology of Hope’, Scottish Journal of Theology, 21 (1968), 129–144CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The present writer was encouraged, particularly in Fr Kerr's review‐article, by the phenotypic consonances between positions which Moltmann's book and this essay accept or reject. Further consideration suggests, however, that Moltmann's use of ‘creative expectation’ puts emphasis on expectation of a something to the detriment of the creativity permitted. It is difficult to see how any such limitation of creativity will avoid, in the long run, reduction to one of the positions professedly rejected by Moltmann, that of acquiescent Christianity, blessing Polaris submarines and saying grace at the feast of White Anglo‐Saxon domination; once more leaving hope and politics for different worlds. It is clear, however, that it would be an impertinence to such an important book as Moltmann's to do more at this point that to register present reservations and tentatively promise a future analysis of some of Moltmann's arguments.
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